The Meerkats’ Book on Money. Ilinda Markov
its significance is not dualistic.
At the time of the first Olympics when men (sorry girls) were competing for no money prize but a plate of palm leaves, (later they started to receive 500 drachmas per a champion), Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright put some interesting words in the mouth of his hero Chremylus when the latter addressed no other but the god Plutus, Wealth: “No one ever gets their fill of you.” The line continues with a so-too-well predictable example like, “If someone gets his hands on thirteen talents, he hankers all the more to get sixteen; and if he achieves that, he wants forty, or else he says life is not worth living,” It’s like being around the beer draft, all you want is more and more beer and you don’t know what’s enough at least until the following morning. Here talent is not what you call a kid who writes brilliant essays. In this case talent is a unit of value equal to the amount of 26 kg of pure silver. How about that?
This shows that the idea of money as a thing of everybody’s diet could be found far back in history around the time when money had been invented, minted and put in circulation. A tempting food that you can watch in the hands of gourmet chef traders who creates chef-d’oeuvres and hour-d’oeuvres and what not for the most delicious meal but also a food you can choke on if you are not careful enough if you bite off more than you can chew and stuff yourself to death.
It’s well known that literature provides us with one of the best historic records so this walk back to the ancient Greek drama, you know from the time when women were not allowed to go on stage and all female roles were performed by men, comes in handy.
Aristophanes’ play was actually called Plutus (Wealth) and alongside this character appears the goddess of poverty Penia claiming that without poverty there would be no slaves and no fine and luxury foods as nobody would work if everyone was rich. Towards the end of the play even the Olimpian gods are pissed off because all humans follow Plutus and they are but forgotten. We are talking here of 408 BC. Has anything changed? Hardly. Aristophanes who was smart and cunning wrote another comedy which remains popular even today. It’s called Lysistrata and it’s about a woman by the same name who in 411 BC urged women to deny all man any sex as a means of forcing them to negotiate peace during the Peloponnesisn war. Money and sex seem to have always been a trump card for attracting the public over millenniums. Perhaps they were/are thought to be behind the meaning of life and while sex is something inherited from nature, money means a better house, a better car, more travels around the world, keeping up with the Jones, going for perpetual growth like the whole capitalist world we live in.
The legend of king Midas shows to what length people are ready to go to achieve “that”. Midas had a wish whatever he touches to turn into gold and the gods granted this wish. Then as the legend goes he was happy for a while but when he got hungry, really hungry not for gold, and sat at the table he started to churn more gold by touching his food and of course what everybody knows gold might be highly desirable but it’s not edible.
ELIZABETH
Back home that is not my home I prepare my own hot, black, healing ambrosia. My greed for coffee is the only greed I know and this special cup has to erase the blur in my mind, and make me think. But first I ring my mother’s phone which I keep charged and listen as it responds with a bran from Bach’s Coffee Cantata. As a person who has hardly ever associated with her father I find the fight between a daughter and her father over coffee in the cantata fascinating yet deeply disturbing.
.Balancing the cup I go out onto the shaky deck manoeuvring on the humped and squeaky planks, the wooden structure is not unlike the second piglet’s house blown away by the Big Bad Wolf. Tonight it feels spooky in the garden and for the first time I feel uncomfortable being alone.
Remember me? I am here and you are not alone.
“Can’t you understand, that’s a diagnosis what you are talking about?”
Let’s go in. It’s not warm enough for a little Meerkat out here.
“Not yet!”
I have to face myself after I crossed the line today stealing a packet of Columbian grade AA coffee from Manoli’s personal supply. In a way it hurts more than when Alec didn’t get up from bed while introducing me to his short-sighted Chinese girl.
Some days after the infamous introduction I picked another casual job but while carrying a tray with three tall glasses of affogato I got a seizure. There were shocked cries and crunchy sounds of chaotic steps on glass as I was lying in a heap, my body shaking uncontrollably. What followed was a free fall. Diagnosed with anxiety and depression and full of drugs I struggled to get up in the morning for work. Inevitably I missed to call in and the job was not there for me when fighting dizziness and nausea I arrived hours later.
The telephone!
My telephone must have been ringing for a while.
I answer but the pounding of my revved up with caffeine heart is all I hear.
A ping signals a massage. “I want to see you. Alec.”
He sends messages like this. I ignore them.
A blast rattles the windows.
I hold my breath until I am sure it’s only the night breeze coming from the ocean, travelling on the river like an arrow on its way to pierce the heart of the city.
I lock the terrace door and check the windows then sit in a deep reflection, my eyes brooding over my mother’s floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of old and shabby, stained books passed down from hand to hand, soul to soul. Pages ripped off, words floating loose, authorless, titleless, dusty, pale, chapters swapped with a happy end or an appendix, epilogues disclosing ghost writers. Fragile edges crumble at a touch, going to ashes. Books with margines like fjord coastlines, rolled, folded up, swollen like an old woman’s ankles, dog-eared.
My mother’s books. She spent her last months reading them over and over.
Now I read them too, sniffing them, trying to trace a DNA print of her, listening to the rustling of their crispy bodies, feeling their skin eroded like the surface of the moon. I make shelves in my heart for her books, they come with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, balding from chemio. I don’t want them to feel crippled. I give them all my love. I don’t want them to be forgotten. But they will be because with me they’ll go to the never-never land of death. It was in one of these books where I read of the Mayan Goddess of suicide. They used to have such a goddess named Ixtab and her suicide method was only one: by hanging. Since a child I was always terrified of choking, that petrifying moment when no oxygen is penetrating my airways. How many times I had swallowed buttons, batteries, small plastic balls, licked on sequins ripped from my mother’s dresses. I excuse myself to mighty Ixtab for I am going to resort on something else, something more endurable and elegant. For a moment I got afraid that I won’t be able to do it myself but then if I can’t bring myself to do it it won’t be suicide, would it. Why not? How about by proxy? Hire someone to finish me off. That seems a brilliant idea. I start to relax, a faint smile appears on my lips and I am sure I can even detect a smile on my mother’s lips on the portrait. I wonder whether she harboured suicide thoughts and put on a brave face just because of me.
She loved you.
Too late now to ask. The past is gone. The present is stalling waiting for me to act. Perhaps one final act and I’ll be ready. Then I remember that to hire someone to kill me I have to pay. The fact that I haven’t got money even to pay for my own death sounds more distressing than anything else.
I get up and look for my pills. There are eleven left, all antidepressant prescribed by my Indian-born GP with lustrous hair and skin plumped with thousands of years natural care secrets. I hope eleven is enough.
Then I look for some leftovers of my mother’s pills. I don’t read the labels, no matter what they are, they’ll do the job. I fall on my knees in front of her portrait. “I love you, too” I whisper but I don’t cry because soon, very soon we will be together.
I am about to get water when my eyes fall on something shiny, long and purple. The thing I bought with my first earned money for someone special.